Mitigating Cybersickness in Virtual Reality Systems through Foveated Depth-of-Field Blur

Abstract

Cybersickness is one of the major roadblocks in the widespread adoption of mixed reality devices. Prolonged exposure to these devices, especially virtual reality devices, can cause users to feel discomfort and nausea, spoiling the immersive experience. Incorporating spatial blur in stereoscopic 3D stimuli has shown to reduce cybersickness. In this paper, we develop a technique to incorporate spatial blur in VR systems inspired by the human physiological system. The technique makes use of concepts from foveated imaging and depth-of-field. The developed technique can be applied to any eye tracker equipped VR system as a post-processing step to provide an artifact-free scene. We verify the usefulness of the proposed system by conducting a user study on cybersickness evaluation. We used a custom-built rollercoaster VR environment developed in Unity and an HTC Vive Pro Eye headset to interact with the user. A Simulator Sickness Questionnaire was used to measure the induced sickness while gaze and heart rate data were recorded for quantitative analysis. The experimental analysis highlighted the aptness of our foveated depth-of-field effect in reducing cybersickness in virtual environments by reducing the sickness scores by approximately 66%.

Using Blur for Perceptual Investigation and Training in Sport? A Clear Picture of the Evidence and Implications for Future Research

“…Integrating the blur manipulation within a VR environment could be promising and open new possibilities; however, some methodological and practical questions need to be considered. To reduce so-called cybersickness, and also enable depth perception similar to that experienced in the real world, it has been suggested that VR systems should ideally incorporate both depth of field (DoF) and foveated rendering techniques that introduce blur into the visual stimuli (Hussain et al, 2021 ). The former approach involves applying blur to visual stimuli that are located at different physical depths than the focal point.…”

Upper limb rehabilitation system based on virtual reality for breast cancer patients: Development and usability study

“…Halo screen symptoms may include system characteristics (for example, head tracking, rendering, vision, optical), user interaction factors (lack of motion control, visual acceleration or deceleration, VR experience for a longer duration and frequent head movements in VR games), and personal perception factors (gender, age, history of motion sickness, lack of VR experience) [ 58 ]. Therefore, when designing VR scenes and animations, the experience of cybersickness can be reduced according to the influencing factors of cybersickness [ 59 ]: (1) the user actively controls his viewpoint and adjusts it; (2) avoid or limit linear or angular acceleration or deceleration to reduce stimulation of the vestibular organs; (3) display visual indicators or movement tracks to users; and (4) dynamically blur the unimportant areas.…”

A review of cybersickness in head-mounted displays: raising attention to individual susceptibility

“…In order to mimic these two blur effects in VR, researchers explored two blurring solutions: non-salient blurring (Nie et al 2019), and depth-of-field blur (DOF blur) (Hussain et al 2021;Chen et al 2021). Nie et al (2019) presented a novel method by blurring the non-salient area dynamically.…”

“…The authors indicated that the navigation style determines the effectiveness of such a mitigation method (e.g., it cannot help to decrease the discomfort in rotational movement). Hussain et al (2021) combined two kinds of blur effects, where the overall scene was divided into three sections corresponding to the foveal, near, and mid peripheral regions, and added filter accordingly. The final results indicate a significant reduction of cybersickness with Foveated Depth-of-Field blur.…”